Unreal Adventures - Part 1
Coronavirus, social distancing and self quarantine is what has been occurring across the country for several weeks. My employer suggested that IT people work from home, so I that’s what I do. I haven’t been out of my house in five days, but to be fair I probably wouldn’t have been out of the house anyway. I broke my leg in January while playing hockey and that has severly curtailed my activity level. I went weeks without leaving the house after surgery, so I’m quite used to being holed up. Having to stay home does not bother me.
On Facebook I see friends posting about how BORED they are, and I am unable to empathize. I’m hardly ever bored. I always have that feeling that there is so much left unfinished in a day. Even when I was unable to get out of bed I used that as opportunity to put a dent in my reading list and binge watch some television that I had been meaning to get to. When I wasn’t doind that I slept. I slept a lot. I was stuck in bed for several weeks and can’t say I was ever bored.
A few years ago I started a Udemy class on developing games using Unreal Engine, then about as soon as I started it I moved on to something different. It didn’t really interest me at the time as I had other projects occupying my attention. This last weekend I thought since I have plenty of time and nothing pressing to do that it would be a good time to pick up the class where I left off, but to my suprise the course as it had existed in 2017 had been archived because it was out of date. No problem, I had forgotten everything anyway, so I started a new Unreal course.
So I was following along in the new course and shortly after the introduction and it came time to install the Unreal Engine, and as is the case with most Udemy courses, the assumption is you are working on either Mac or Windows. For me this is kind of a problem because I’ve been strictly a Linux user in my home for about a year now. Unfortunately there is not an Epic installer for Linux, nor is there a linux based binary distribution for Unreal. If you want to run it on Linux, you have to build it from source.
So that’s what I am going to do. I’m going to build Unreal Engine for use on my own personal Linux machine and complete the Udemy course. I have plenty of experience with building software products from source. It’s something you learn to do when you’re a linux user, but the experiences seem to vary.
This could suck.
Since I’m using a Linux distro that is not very popular it probably will suck, but it will be an adventure.